Heroine every woman's always wanted to be
She’s witty, loyal and true to herself As a racy book updates Jane Austen’s Lizzy Bennet 200 years on, four top authors reveal why she’s the . . .
The new book eligible is something I’ve been looking forward to for months. It’s a modern reworking of the great Jane austen novel Pride and Prejudice by one of america’s most entertaining writers Curtis Sittenfeld and had been recommended to me by my incredibly fussy literary editor in January, and by thousands of my online friends.
Well now I have read it — in one night — and I can say it is, with a few reservations, worth the hype.
It takes the five Bennet sisters from Jane austen’s classic book and transplants them from rural england to the suburbs of Ohio in the american Midwest.
Instead of being in their early 20s, the two eldest sisters, Jane and elizabeth, are now in their late 30s and nearing their fertility sell-by date.
They live in new york — Jane is teaching yoga, Lizzy works as a magazine feature writer. (The younger sisters, Kitty and Lydia, are weight and diet obsessed, while Mary, the middle one, is doing a master’s degree in psychology.)
Jane is trying to have a baby through artificial insemination before she hits 40 and Lizzy is having an unsatisfactory on/off fling with a married man.
It’s Lizzy who still captures the reader’s imagination. Less beautiful than Jane, but more intelligent and resourceful, she’s still the woman’s woman, who won’t put up with men who fall short of her expectations.
When the sisters meet Chip Bingley, a doctor who has been the star of a reality TV show called eligible, at a barbecue given by their neighbours, Jane is instantly attracted to him, but Lizzy feels snubbed by Chip’s friend the supercilious neurosurgeon Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Just as in Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy overhears Darcy dismissing the local girls and takes a vehement dislike to him, even though he is handsome and clearly, thanks to his status and wealth, very eligible.
he becomes the man she loves to hate, and then in a 21st-century twist, he becomes the man with whom she loves to have hate sex.
What she can’t see, and this, I think, is why readers have always identified with Lizzy, is that Darcy is clearly the right man for her.
We love her for the fact that she refuses to be a gold-digger and turns down his first offer of marriage because he insults her family.
But as with austen’s original, the course of true love does not run smooth, until it does. There’s an awful lot to love about this Lizzy — she’s sparky, loyal, sexually assertive — but then, as the authors below reveal, there always was.